Controle social da política de assistência social pela sociedade civil: caminhos e descaminhos de uma política em construção

摘要

With the Federal Constitution of 1988, social rights are guaranteed by law in order to confront the various expressions of social issues, derived from inequalities engendered in the capital-labor relationship. In order to reinforce these rights, Public Policies are needed. In this context, Social Assistance - as a policy on Social Security - assumes the status of Public policy, seeking to overcome the historical tradition of favor and donation, strengthening its status as a social right. This dissertation is aimed at socializing the results of the research, conducted altogether with the Program for Post-Graduation in Social Service - PUC / RS – Master’s Degree in Social Service, which has the objective of examining how the civil society is exercising the social control from the Social Assistance Policy, through the CEAS and FEAS, in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, so as to identify their leading nature in this process. This research has been guided by the historical reference of dialectical Materialism. It has a qualitative nature and, therefore, it is not intended to make generalizations. The design of the State and the Civil Society, developed in the study, is viewed from the perspective of Gramsci’s legacy of a Wider State, consisting of Political Society and Civil Society. The perspective of social control, as the control of Civil Society upon the State, is central to the study. The locus of this research were the State Council of Social Assistance (CEAS / RS) and the State Forum for Non-governmental Social Assistance (FEAS / RS), through the participation of representatives from the Civil Society in those spaces. The methodology of this work was developed from the techniques of individual, collective and group-focused research, using a semi- structured questionnaire form. The empirical data had the goal of answering how the Civil Society is exercising the social control from the Social Assistance Policy, at the state level, during the period of 1999-2007, in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. Some of the obtained results show that the social control is a disputed process, which may have greater or lesser impact on changing the reality and the effectiveness of the Public Policy on Social Assistance, according to the ability of political influence of an organized Civil Society in Public spaces and fields.